Lighten your load by increasing your load

This may seem contradictory, but it works when it comes to our skeletal muscle and its capability to adapt to increased workloads. When this increased workload is done regularly over a period of time, it will feel lighter. 

The exact opposite happens when we become sedentary and our muscles atrophy (shrink) and become weak. When our muscles shrink, movement becomes harder, and a greater stress load is put on our bones, tendons, ligaments and joints due to our muscles not supporting the weight we carry adequately. 

We need to always remember that when our skeletal muscles that help power our physical movements become weaker, our body weight will feel heavier and will cause us to tire much easier!

Solution one is to consistently do whatever we expect to be able to continue to do. This helps keep things from getting harder, keeping the muscles used for these particular activities active and familiar with the things you want to be able to continue doing. 

This works the same way for an athlete that wants to maintain capability as well as someone that wants to be able to continue being able to climb a flight of stairs. The best way to be able to keep the stairs from hurting or exhausting us is to use them every day. This helps keep the muscles used for climbing the stairs conditioned for this particular activity.

Though solution one helps us to be able to continue doing our tasks, it does not make the tasks easier. Our strength only builds up to what we’re requiring of it. For this very same reason, if someone keeps repeating the same routine in a exercise routine for a year using the same amount of weight/resistance, a year later it will feel just as heavy. Muscle simply adapts to what we require of it.

Solution two is the one that I really like, since it can help lighten our former load! If you want to make the stairs easier to climb, instead of just taking your body up the stairs, carry some dumbbells up the stairs and carry them back down when you come back. 

When your muscles get used to carrying you and the dumbbells up the stairs, eventually your weight alone will feel lighter! You can also increase the weight load on your muscles by climbing the stairs faster. 

This same principle applies to an athlete or to powerlifting. Simply increasing the load you familiarize your muscle to, over a period of time, will lead to muscle adaption, and will simply make the former load easier on the muscles used for this particular activity. 

If an athlete ties a tire to a rope and harnesses it to his or her body and pulls it through the normal track or field exercise, the normal routine or physical demand in the sport will become much easier. 

A personal formula to use: think about everything you expect your body to do for you, whether its aggressive in nature such as competitive sports, or simply a desire to be independently able to care for your basic needs. Once you know exactly what you expect out of your body, put solution one to work and this will help you maintain capabilities, but if you want to make things get easier, start incorporating solution two into your routine.

What causes a lot of pain, injuries, and feelings of aging, is not from doing something the body is used to, but rather something up and beyond what we have conditioned it for. Every so often we need more strength and more endurance, and when our body has been preconditioned, we are less prone to injury.

If things in life get too easy, we become weaker and eventually even the easy things in life will become harder to do. It’s pretty neat to realize that our body is designed to strengthen as a natural reaction during stressful times to guard us against future stresses of similar proportions.